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December 20, 2022 at 04:50 PM
A House committee voted to release Donald Trump’s tax information to the public, capping a three-year legal saga initiated by Democrats to obtain and release the former president’s closely held financial documents.
Tuesday’s action by the Ways and Means Committee — over the objections of the panel’s Republicans — comes in the waning days of the House Democratic majority and one day after Trump was referred for criminal prosecution by another House panel.
The double whammy adds to what’s been a bad six-week stretch for Trump politically, during which he was blamed for the GOP’s disappointing midterm election results and had what critics called a lackluster 2024 campaign launch marred by controversies.
The panel, which has an eight-seat Democratic majority, agreed on a party-line vote to release information from Trump’s personal and business tax returns from 2015 to 2020. Democrats first requested the documents in 2019 to help aid an investigation into the annual audit of presidents. After a lengthy court battle, the Ways and Means Committee obtained the financial filings late last month.
It wasn’t clear Tuesday when the full set of documents would be available.
Texas Representative Kevin Brady, the committee’s top Republican, said releasing the information “will set a terrible precedent that unleashes a dangerous new political weapon that reaches far beyond the former president, and overturns decades of privacy protections for average Americans.”
Though candidates for the US presidency aren’t required by law to show voters their tax returns, they have done so for decades as a gesture of transparency. Trump was the exception.
